Knowing the right plants to have in your survival garden will save you from cultivating irrelevant crops, as well as going through unnecessary stress. Your survival garden is not quite what your idea of a garden has always been. Your basic idea of a garden must be “pristinely fostered beds with perfect, flourishing plants, devoid of weeds or disturbances.” Well, time to get that idea out or your head. We do not build a survival garden to be pleasant to sight as the ordinary garden is.

Why Your Survival Garden Should Not Be So Beautiful

Don’t get this wrong. You can go out of your way to set up a gorgeously trimmed survival garden with captivating flowers and Kaleidoscopic butterflies. Everyone will definitely be pleased by a great-looking garden, but here’s the catch: everyone includes neighbors who may want to help you do some harvesting overnight while you’re asleep. Sometimes, these people may not be so tactful; they may just decide to do some cultivation on your garden with a rifle to the back of your head. So much for a wonderful outlook, isn’t it?

Best 5 Plants To Have In Your Survival Garden

Thus, there are specific plants that you can grow in your survival garden to give it that perfect camouflage. But it’s more than that. A survival garden is typically meant for harsh times, so it should contain crops that will survive without much nutrients. Also, these plants may be the only source of foods you’ll be having for a long while, so they should be all-encompassing and, lest I forget, easily cultivated.

Taking a cue from these requirements, let us look at the top 5 plants you should cultivate in your survival garden.

Perennials

Perennials are arguably the first crops to plant in your survival garden, and for obvious reasons. You can keep enjoying these plants for several years after the first cultivation, as they grow year after year, thus providing you with foods for little effort. You can add perennials to your garden at just anytime, so you don’t need to begin with them.

In the first to second year, perennials can be tasking. You will have to do a lot of groundwork, after which you’re good to go. A good thing about these crops is that they are hardly identifiable among traditional plants, which we may see as weeds.

Common examples of perennials include: 

• Asparagus Daylilies
• Egyptian Walking Onions
• Horseradish
• Sunchokes
• Sea Kale

Fruits & Nuts

Combined cultivation of perennials and fruit & nut trees is an excellent base for concealing the rest of your garden. Fruits & nuts trees are food producers, and many people usually can’t identify most of these trees. With the introduction of hard to recognize perennials, others will rarely be able to figure out your survival garden.

Fruits & nut trees will typically require pruning, mulching, and, sometimes, fertilizing if you want to get quality produce. Like the perennials, fruits & nut trees will continue to give you food for several years, so you should consider having them in your garden. Common fruit & nut trees to have in your survival garden are:

• Almonds
• Apple
• Hazelnuts
• Pawpaw
• Peaches
• Plums
• Walnuts, which are bound to grow huge as time passes.

Herbs

Herbs offer unique benefits that are rarely offered by other plants. They have a lot of functions, which include, using as alternative medicine and helping to drive out pests & insects disturbing your garden. These are critical uses because you may not have medical help when SHTF and will thus have to settle for traditional medicines. Also, herbs ensure that you do not need to spend on herbicides and insecticides. Lastly, they double as an effective ground cover.

You can plant several herbs in your survival garden, most of which have different uses. I suggest that you cultivate the ones which you can use for a lot of uses (multipurpose), for example:

• Lavender
• Mint
• Oregano
• Rosemary
• Sage 
• Thyme

Brambles

Blackberries & raspberries are the finest brambles to grow in your survival garden for obvious reasons. They produce a large amount of berries and continue to grow year after year. Every year, brambles will produce new shoots, which can become even invasive if you fail to tame them. 

What else, brambles are dense with thorns, so they can serve as deterrents to keep your garden off-limits to unwelcome people. 

Blackberries are especially naturally occurring, and they are fortunately transplanted very easily. You can just uproot a single cane and move to your garden, and within some years, you’d have had yourself a great blackberry patch. 

Annuals

And, of course, annuals! What would your garden be without annuals? However, most make a common mistake when cultivating annuals: they grow too many of these crops, therefore leaving themselves in a situation that requires intense work every spring.

Thankfully, this isn’t the case with a survival garden since you’re growing perennials and trees majorly. This doesn’t mean that you cannot cultivate annuals in your survival garden, but you’ll just be careful with selections. Go for the annuals that produce most foods.

A carrot seed will give only one carrot while a green bean seed will give a dozen seeds of green beans. You can see a clear difference, isn’t it? If you select the right plants, you’ll grow a lot of food, even in a small garden. Here are annuals to start your survival garden with:

• Acorn squash
• Butternut squash
• Cherry tomatoes
• Corn
• Eggplant
• Green beans
• Kale
• Pumpkins
• Summer squash
• Sweet peas
• Zucchinis

Concluding The Plants To Have In Your Survival Garden

Identifying the right plants to have in your survival garden before you start will see that you do not suffer unnecessary stress. Planting and harvesting are quite straightforward since your crops are planned and well suited for harsh conditions. Also, you do not have problems with wanderers as they’ll hardly be able to tell your garden apart from wild bushes, and even if they can, you have brambles in place for some guard.